The coincidental, ephemeral and yet meaningful encounters serve as an extension of knowledge-production, reflection and learning together: Cruising Curators is an open invitation to think, act, recollect, fuse and circulate together with our communities-to-be.
The collective started off as a working group of the 11th Berlin Biennale’s Curatorial Workshop How now to gather and is currently constituted by: Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach and Sarnt Utamachote.
cruisingcurators@gmail.com
Founding Members
Bengisu Çağlayan (she/her) is a curator and cultural worker practising within the realms of curatorial research, artistic collaboration methodologies, (non-)institutional partnerships and fundraising for the arts. Mainly interested in debates on ‘the moving body’ and the experience of choreographic phenomena, Çağlayan combines research and practice that address the isolated and collective psyche of subjugated bodies. She received a research scholarship from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe in 2023. Her five-part radio show that brings together soundscapes of politics, uprisings and identities aired on Refuge Worldwide, a community radio based in Berlin.
Çağlayan currently works at the Berlin Biennale, and is the co-founder of STRÜKTÜR e.V., a non-profit organization for situated and diasporic artistic production and imagination from Turkey.
Keeping a second base in her native Istanbul, Çağlayan worked for the Istanbul Biennial since 2016 while undertaking additional roles for the Pavilion of Turkey at the International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. She writes regularly for the bimonthly magazine Sanat Dünyamız. Çağlayan holds a BA in Arts and Cultural Management from Istanbul Bilgi University and completed an Erasmus exchange program at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. bengisucaglayan.com
Former Members
Nuno de Brito Rocha (2020–2021)
(Publication)
Image © Lothringer 13 Halle
The key questions that drove the curatorial committee were: How can a group be (re)productive? What strategies are there? How can we address conflicts? How do we deal with vulnerabilities? How much care work is involved in collective processes? How do we speak to one another? What is recognition? How do we deal with resources and time despite the urgency of the tasks at hand? What does it mean to (un)learn within the group?
To this end, four collectives were invited to share their perspectives on collective practice, crisis, and doubt. In different forms, the groups Contemporary Nights, Cruising Curators, Çay mal Ehrlich, and BIPoC der HFF have discussed their focuses and perspectives on crises and doubts, which they view as ways of negotiating these issues and perhaps even as possible courses of action. Each contribution functions as a stand-alone publication; and as a loose ensemble, they comprise the magazine as a whole.
In the process, a whole range of posters and texts have been produced and a release event took place on March 18, 2023 in Munich, Germany. The working group for this project consists of Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern and Eirini Fountedaki.
The publication is available online here.